Since Doug Smock has joined as a Supply Excellence contributor, I have gone back and re-read my now dog eared copy of his book, Straight to the Bottom Line. It contains extremely insightful strategies for measuring supply management performance, quantifying the financial impact of supply improvements, and securing support and alignment from C-level executives for [...]

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Straight to the Bottomline co-author Doug Smock’s recent post on product costing has drawn a lot of attention and comments. I have elected to reprint those of Jessica Dunlop, head of ITT Industries’ e-sourcing program. As noted in previous posts, reverse auctions are a key tool in ITT’s sourcing tookit. Here Jessica offers an alternative view on how reverse auctions are [...]

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Thanks again to Doug Smock for igniting the discussion around product costing and the convergence of design and supply. 
I agree with Doug: Harley-Davidson was indeed a supply management innnovator before its time. As a senior editor at Purchasing magazine in the pre-Internet boom, I had the opportunity to do a cover story on Harley’s advanced [...]

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Today, I’d like to welcome back Supply Excellence guest blogger, Doug Smock. Co-author of the supply management best-seller, Straight to the Bottom Line, Smock will continue his findings on new strategies and systems for product should- and future costing.
In a recent post on Spend Matters, Jason Busch briefly reviewed a CAD-based costing technology from a [...]

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AMR rode into the On Demand/Sofware as a Service (SaaS) debate last week with its guns loaded with much-needed frameworks for evaluating SaaS solutions and measuring success of providers in this rapidly emerging enterprise application model.
In one of his first notes on the subject, AMR’s new resident SaaS wrangler, Robert Bois, got beyond the speculators and took [...]

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